The Royal Babysitter
by nothingnothingtralala
Summary: When Sophie wishes her baby sister away to the goblins, she gets a little more than she bargained for... One-shot.


_This sorta feels like a spoiler, because it's more like an epilogue of GSUV than anything else. On the other hand, so was my Christmas fic, so hopefully you guys won't mind a dosage of fluff. Anyway, I felt like I should put it up, because my essays are horribly stressful and there probably won't be an update of GSUV for a while. Enjoy the crazy..._

* * *

"Come on, sweetie, you've _got_ to eat," said Sophie in a tone of increasing desperation. She tried, for about the fourteenth time, to jam a mouthful of toast into her little sister's mouth.

Felicity stuck her bottom lip out stubbornly and _refused._ She didn't even need to say anything – Sophie knew it was hopeless.

"Please?" she said half-heartedly, knowing even as she spoke that it would be useless. Felicity's lip stuck out even further and began to tremble ominously, tears welling in her baby blue eyes. Sophie tried to quell the nauseating mixture of horror and anger that rose in her at the sight. Felicity had been crying all day. She'd refused to eat, refused to play, refused to sleep. Sophie had had just about enough of the two-year-old's tantrums. If her mother had been there, Felicity would probably have received a light tap on the hand and a stern telling off, enough to make her behave, but as it was Sophie was powerless to quiet the child.

"Well then, don't eat! See if I care!" she muttered, lifting Felicity out of the highchair and putting her onto the floor. "Go play or something. Do what you want." She stomped into the kitchen and washed her hands of the sticky mess that had previously been her little sister's lunch.

Felicity sat where she'd been put and cried. It wasn't even the usual kind of childish, whiny crying; it was a full-on, earsplittingly loud _scream_ that came from the bottom of her little pink slippers and made her whole body tremble.

"You're just being ridiculous now," shouted Sophie over the noise. "Stop throwing tantrums! I'm not even doing anything to upset you!"

Felicity threw her head back and cried harder. Sophie came to the door and looked at her dispassionately. Usually a pretty child, Felicity's blonde ringlets – slightly encrusted with jam – and engaging round eyes, now creased up and tearful, made for a less than prepossessing sight, especially combined with the extreme redness of her face. Her little hands were clenched into fists, and her mouth made a shape like an upside down D as she howled.

"Oh, stop it," Sophie said, half-crossly, half-guiltily, crossing the room to pick up the baby. She was rigid and resisting in her arms. "Shh… calm down. It's okay."

Unfortunately Felicity did not seem to agree. She began kicking her legs with all the force in her body – a surprising amount. Sophie winced and hastily put her down again. "Well, of all the ungrateful – " she snapped. "You're nothing but a noisy nuisance. I wish the goblins would come and take you away!"

Even as the words left her mouth, she wished she could take them back. She hadn't meant to say them; they had slipped out, on instinct, or perhaps half-conscious memory…

The instant her sentence was complete, Felicity vanished.

The silence in the room was deafening. Sophie hardly dared to breathe. "No," she whispered to herself. "No, please… I didn't mean it…"

The distant sound of a crying child echoed in the room again, and she pricked up her ears. "Felicity?" Hands shaking, she glanced round the empty room. "Is that you?"

Upstairs, a noise – she darted out the room, shouting for her sister. As she climbed the stairs, the crying became louder, and she moved faster, almost convinced that it had all been a hallucination and that Felicity was upstairs crying for a nappy change or something.

She opened the door into her bedroom and bounded through joyfully – and then stopped with a gasp of shocked amazement.

"You!"

* * *

The king of the goblins looked back at her a little wearily. "Yes, it's me."

Sophie's brown eyes widened in confusion. "But…" It certainly wasn't what she'd expected. The Goblin King – wasn't he supposed to be gorgeous and mysterious and scary? She'd had a vague idea of glitter and a cloak and perhaps some armour or something equally intimidating. But he looked nothing like that.

For one thing, though she could see that he was clearly a very beautiful man, he looked… _tired_. The skin under his blue eyes was dark, as if he'd missed several nights' sleep, and his face was white rather than pale. His hair was messily pushed back, and he was wearing very simple clothes – a white shirt (ominously stained with some kind of unrecognisable substance) tucked into dark, close-fitting trousers.

Most astonishing, however, were the two babies he held. One was tucked upside-down under his arm, and appeared to be quite happy there, waving its arms and legs absent-mindedly, while the other clung to his shoulder and cried almost as loudly as Felicity had been. They were quite a lot younger than her little sister – perhaps about five or six months old – and both had fluffy dark blonde hair, a lot of it.

Sophie just stared for a while, while the Goblin King awkwardly shifted the crying baby into a better position in an attempt to calm it. It continued to cry steadily, with no apparent intention of stopping.

"Where's Felicity?" she said eventually.

"What?" said the Goblin King, irritably.

"Where's Felicity?" she repeated over the noise.

"She's back in my castle, in the centre of the Labyrinth," he explained. "Hush, just a moment, _please_, William?" he added, in a pleading aside, to the baby. It ignored him.

"Well, give her back!" demanded Sophie, feeling bolder when it became obvious that the king was somewhat distracted.

"You wished her away; she belongs to me now – " began the king, though without much conviction.

"I _have_ to have her back!" she interrupted him. "I didn't mean it!"

The king rolled his eyes. "I thought you'd never say it. Very well, then – "

And a second later they were standing somewhere else entirely.

Wide-eyed again, Sophie looked around the room she found herself in. It was large, spacious, and airy; the stone walls were covered with brightly coloured tapestries, and the floor was softened with a thick red carpet. At one end of the room, two thrones sat side-by-side; at the other was what appeared to be a playpen of some kind, equipped with toys, cushions, and story-books. Felicity, no longer crying, was making cooing noises over a doll almost as large as her.

Above the thrones was a full-length portrait of the Goblin King. He was dressed much more flamboyantly in the painting, and he was looking down at the woman beside him with a tender smile. She was one of the most beautiful women Sophie had ever seen; her long dark hair, set with a pretty silver coronet, flowed over her shoulders and her green eyes shone warmly into the room. Sophie assumed that this was the mother of the twin babies, and wondered where she was.

The room was populated, other than the two humans, the Goblin King, and the babies, with goblins. At least, Sophie assumed they were goblins; they were busy with various tasks, ranging from polishing the throne to loudly arguing as to what day it was and whose turn it was to trim the hedges. Some were with Felicity, who seemed entirely unconcerned with their slightly unnatural appearance. They were quite taken with her blonde curls.

"What's going on?" Sophie said in a half-whisper.

The Goblin King sighed heavily, and put down the baby that wasn't crying. Only his way of putting it (her, Sophie guessed by the little pink romper suit she was wearing) down was extremely unorthodox; he sat her _on a wall_, and the baby happily crawled up towards the ceiling – apparently entirely unconcerned by any fear of gravity and its effects. Sophie's eyes nearly fell out of her head.

"Look," said the king in a business-like tone that was marred only slightly by the continued and only slightly abated screaming of William, "it's like this. You wished your baby sister here, which means that she belongs to me. Fortunately for you, however, I don't happen to want her. Goodness knows we've got enough of the darn things around the place as it is, and with Sarah away I just really don't have the energy."

"Then give her back?" ventured Sophie, trying very hard not to look over at the crawling baby – who was now playing with what appeared to be a crystal ball of some sort, hanging upside down from the stone ceiling.

"It's not that easy," explained the king, sounding harassed. He juggled with William for a moment, his face wearing an expression that Sophie was quite familiar with; she'd been wearing it herself only minutes earlier. With his one free hand, he made a strange twirling sort of gesture, and sort of _drew_ another crystal ball from the air. He offered it to William. The baby stopped crying for a moment and considered it, but concluded that it was beneath his notice and began to whimper once more.

The king sighed again. "I can't send you back for at least three hours," he explained. "Normally I'd get you to run the Labyrinth, but honestly I just don't have the time to watch you, and without my help you certainly wouldn't make it far in three hours."

"Three hours?" gasped Sophie in dismay, disregarding all mention of the Labyrinth, which she instinctively shied away from. "But that's ages!"

The king shrugged. "It's the best offer I can make."

"What am I going to do til then?" she asked, defeatedly.

The king of the goblins looked at her, and suddenly his regal air vanished completely and he was just a rather tired man in need of some form of alcoholic beverage, followed by a hot bath and a comfortable bed.

"I don't suppose you'd help me look after William and Lori?" he asked hopefully. "The goblins are very good with them but – between you and me – I don't quite trust them completely, and Sarah's visiting her family until tomorrow, and the fact is that I'm quite exhausted and have _hours_ of correspondence to catch up on…"

Sophie glanced up involuntarily at Lori, who had got bored of playing with the crystal and was heading with dogged determination towards the play area and Felicity. "Er," she said doubtfully, "I guess I could…?" She had a feeling that babysitting _three_ babies, two of which could crawl upside down, wouldn't be any more fun than babysitting one. But the king looked so grateful that she hadn't the heart to change her mind.

"Oh, thank you," he said hastily. "Here – " and before she could move away, he'd thrust William's warm, wriggling weight into her arms.

To her astonishment, the baby finally stopped crying and opened his eyes – a beautiful shade of greeny-grey – to look at her properly. "Hello," said Sophie to him, suddenly remembering why it was that she liked children. William looked at her for a moment more, and then gave her an enormous, toothless smile.

"_Peace_," groaned the Goblin King, rubbing his forehead. "Blessed peace. You're a genius, er – "

"Sophie."

"A pleasure. Sophie, my name is Jareth, King of the Goblins." He gave her a courtly bow – to her embarrassment, her cheeks flushed – and turned to Felicity, now busily playing with Lori and four excitable goblins. "Let's go to my study, shall we? I might even be able to get some letters done, at this rate."

* * *

Three hours later, the ornate clock on the wall chimed to a surprisingly domestic scene.

Jareth was at his desk, busily filling a sheet of high-quality letter paper with his flowing, elegant script.

_My dearest darling, _

_I hope this letter finds you well, and enjoying your time away from the Underground. I miss you so much that every day seems like a thousand, my precious, and I am sure that the babies miss you too, and we are all very much looking forward to your return…_

Sophie sat cross-legged on a cushion, surrounded by goblins and children, a thumb-sucking and now placid William in her lap (he had categorically refused to be parted from her). Felicity was murmuring nonsense words to a couple of the goblins, and giggling to herself, and the others were listening attentively as Sophie told the familiar story of Cinderella. The goblins were enjoying this hugely, although for some reason they kept interrupting: "It wasn't a glass slipper, they was just made of silver" and "You mean thirteen o'clock?" Meanwhile, old Marta was gathering up what remained of the large supper that had been demolished by human, fae and goblin alike.

Sophie reached the end of her story, to the mutual satisfaction of all listeners (bar one goblin who maintained stoutly that the princess had used a chair to break the wall, and would never have left a shoe behind – much to Sophie's confusion), and glanced at the clock.

"Oh!" she said, surprised. "My time is up."

Jareth looked up from his letter. "So it is," he said mildly. "I don't suppose you fancy staying a while longer? Another ten hours, perhaps?"

Sophie shook her head shyly. "I think really I'd better get back home before my parents do," she said, almost wistfully.

"I thought you might say that," said the Goblin King resignedly. "Well, it was blissful while it lasted. Thank you very much, Sophie. I am forever indebted to you. You must come again sometime, and meet Sarah – I'm sure she'd approve of you."

"I'd like that," she stammered, blushing again. "Come on, Felicity, time to go."

William, tired from his earlier tantrum, submitted happily to being returned to his father, and Lori waved a fat, dimpled little hand to Sophie (admittedly a goblin was holding the hand and causing it to move, but Sophie chose to believe that Lori was saying goodbye). The goblins clustered around her legs as she hoisted Felicity onto her hip.

"G'bye!"

"Come back soon?"

"Fanks for the stories!"

"Can we come play with Flicky some time?"

Sophie grinned. "I don't see why not," she said.

* * *

_Just fyi: Lori is short for Elorya, which happened to be Jareth's mother's name. And don't worry, Sarah was only away for five days. She didn't want to go at all, especially without the children, but Jareth convinced her that she needed some time away from them, especially since she hadn't left their side since they'd been born. _

_Also, Ludo happens to make an excellent babysitter, but he was visiting Sir Didymus that day and couldn't possibly be spared. _

_Sometimes, when Their Majesties are at their wits' end and would do anything to get a few hours alone (to sleep, of course. Get your minds out the gutter... okay maybe that too), they ask Hoggle to babysit, but he grumbles so much that Jareth thinks the twins will grow up bitter if they spend too much time with him._

_Confession: some days I would willingly wish away my siblings, even just to meet Jareth and the babies. _

_Depending on which sibling it was, the goblins would be welcome to keep them..._


End file.
